DDOS ATTACKS

1. GitHub: 1.35 Tbps

On Feb. 28, 2018, GitHub – a popular developer platform – was hit with a
sudden sudden onslaught of traffic that clocked in at 1.35 terabits per second. If
that sound like a lot, that’s because it is – that amount of traffic is not only
massive, it’s record-breaking. According to GitHub, the traffic was traced back to
“over a thousand different autonomous systems (ASNs) across tens of thousand
of unique endpoints.”

2. U.S. Banks: 60 Gbps

In 2012, not one, not two, but a whopping six U.S. banks were targeted
by a string of Ddos attacks. The victims were no small-town banks either. They
included Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, U.S. Bancorp, Citigroup and PNC
Bank.
The attack was carried out by hundreds of hijacked servers, which each
created peak floods of more than 60 gigabits of traffic per second.
At the time, these attacks were unique in their persistence: Rather than
trying to execute one attack and then backing down, the perpetrator(s) barraged
their targets with a multitude of methods in order to find one that worked. So,
even if a bank was equipped to deal with a few types of DDoS attacks, they were
helpless against other types.

3. Spamhaus: 300 Gbps

In 2013, a DdoS attack was launched against Spamhaus, a non-profit
threat intelligence provider. Although Spamhaus, as an anti-spam organization,
was and is regularly threatened and attacked, this DdoS attack was large enough
to knock their website offline, as well as part of their email services.
Like the 2014 attack on CloudFlare mentioned above, this attack utilized
reflection to overload Spamhaus’ servers with 300 gigabits of traffic per second.
The attack was traced to a member of a Dutch company named
Cyberbunker, who seemingly targeted Spamhaus after it blacklisted
Cyberbunker.

4. Occupy Central, Hongkong: 500 Gbps

The PopVote DDoS Attack was carried out in 2014 and targeted the Hong
Kong-based grassroots movement known as Occupy Central. The movement was
campaigning for a more democratic voting system.
 In response to their activities, attacker(s) sent large amounts of traffic to
three of Occupy Central’s web hosting services, as well as two independent sites,
PopVote, an online mock election site, and Apple Daily, a news site, neither of
which were owned by Occupy Central but openly supported its cause.
Presumably, those responsible were reacting to Occupy Central’s pro-democracy
message.
The attack barraged servers with packets disguised as legitimate traffic,
and was executed with not one, not two, but five botnets. This resulted in peak
traffic levels of 500 gigabits per second.

5. CloudFlare: 400 Gbpps

In 2014, security provider and content delivery network CloudFlare was
slammed by approximately 400 gigaabits per second of traffic. The attack was
directed at a single CloudFlare customer and targeted servers in Europe and was
launched with the help of a vulnerability in the Network Time Protocol (NTP), a
networking protocol for computer clock synchronization. Even CloudFlare’s
customers, it was so powerful that it affected CloudFlare’s own network.
This attack illustrated a technique in which attackers use spoofed source
addresses to send mass amounts NTP servers’ responses to the victim. This is
known as “reflection,” since the attacker is able to mirror and amplify traffic.
Shortly after the attack, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team
explained NTP Amplification Attacks are, “especially difficult to block” because
“responses are legitimate data coming from valid servers.”